My name is Monika Renata Stanislawska and I am a second-year doctoral candidate. My dissertation, provisionally entitled Linguistic Interference and Transfer in the Acquisition of English as a Third Language (L3) Among Spanish Monolinguals and Spanish–Polish Heritage Bilinguals, supervised by Dr Mateusz Maciej Pietraszek Krupa and Dra Beatriz López Medina, investigates lexical cross-linguistic influence in children aged ten to twelve in Madrid. Through cognates, false friends and error analysis, I ask how a Romance first language and a Slavic heritage language jointly shape the developing English lexicon of young multilingual learners, a configuration that remains scarcely documented in research on third language acquisition.

My route towards this question ran through practice rather than through theory alone. A graduate in English Philology from the University of Wroclaw, Poland, with master’s degrees in Latin American Studies from the University of Warsaw and in American Studies from the Jagiellonian University, and with postgraduate training in translation at the Institute of Applied Linguistics in Warsaw, I have worked since 2006 as a translator across Polish, Spanish, Italian, English and German. I am a sworn translator of Italian and Spanish appointed by the Polish Ministry of Justice, a sworn translator of Polish accredited in Spain, and a certified legal translator registered with the Chamber of Commerce and Court of Monza, Italy. My practice extends beyond translation proper to localisation, linguistic testing and quality evaluation, post-editing of machine translation, and the use and training of artificial intelligence models for the language industry.

My wider interests include third language acquisition, heritage bilingualism, contrastive linguistics, translation studies and specialised phraseology. I am currently completing the theoretical framework and instrument battery of my study and preparing fieldwork in Madrid schools, while continuing to practise as a sworn and technical translator. Every working day I move between languages. My research examines what happens when children do the same.